I just wrote this reflection on Mes de Misión for a JVC publication, so I thought I'd post it on here too in case you want to read a little more about what we Tacna JV's do every January...
Every year the Tacna JV’s (and this year the crew headed to Andahuaylillas too!) accompany groups of secondary students from two of the schools where we teach on a month-long summer service experience called Mes de Misión (Mission Month). Fr. Fred (the legendary Jesuit who founded both Cristo Rey and Colegio Miguel Pro) started Mes de Misión in the 70's after a severe earthquake/landslide in the northern mountain region of Peru left hundreds of people dead, injured, homeless, and orphaned. Fred took a group of Cristo Rey student volunteers during their summer vacation to help animate the people there, lift their spirits, and bring whatever relief they could after the disaster. Year after year they continued these voluntary service trips in various poor areas of Peru, and several years later Fred made the experience a mandatory part of the Cristo Rey education. When he founded Miguel Pro in 1992, Mes de Misión was included as one of the hallmarks of a child’s education here. Now both schools participate in a Mes de Misión every summer during the month of January for students who are entering into 4th year of secondary (they’d be rising 10th graders in the States), and the JVs have become an integral part of the experience as we provide a lot of support and man/woman power to the teachers who run it.
This year Miguel Pro (accompanied by Seamus, Rose, Ashlen, Jessica, Mallory and me) did its MdM in a small town in the mountain region of Tacna called Ticaco. For the entire month we stayed at the school there, sleeping on the floor of empty classrooms with our 28 students, and working during the day. Ticaco is beautiful, surrounded by mountains, rivers, and breathtaking views (definitely a welcome change from the sand dunes of Tacna) but it also sits at approximately 3200m above sea level so that meant doing manual labor at altitude, and huffing and puffing up the side of a mountain everyday (often with firewood on your back) to get back to the school. Being in the mountains in the middle of rainy season also meant pretty regular downpours every afternoon, really cold nights,and the coldest showers I have ever taken in my life. We took to only bathing every 2 or 3 days just because we couldn’t stand it-that water was so cold it made your head hurt!
There are tons of paths that lead from the pueblo down the mountain to all the farms where the people work, and those paths were full of rocks, so our job was to move them out of the way to make the walk a little easier for all the campesinos. It was a little boring and rather tedious work, but not particularly strenuous so we didn’t suffer too much. But probably the most memorable day for me was the day Seamus, Rose, Jess and I took our groups on a hunt to find firewood. The tiny “kitchen” at the school only had a wood-burning stove, so every couple days we had to bring wood back to cook with, and it was incredibly difficult to find. So one day our cook’s son led us to a river at the very bottom of the valley where he said we’d find tons of leña (firewood). It took us well over an hour just to get to the bottom, and the last half hour or so we were wading back and forth across the river, up and over huge rocks,over plants where we couldn’t tell if they were on solid ground or halfway under water to reach this giant tree that would supposedly provide us with days worth of firewood. Well we finally got there, tired, sweating, scraped, and with wet feet, and the boys went to work with the machetes while the rest of us attempted to craft devices to carry the wood out of plastic sacks, pieces of string, and long-sleeved shirts. We loaded up with as much as we could carry and then proceeded back through the river, over the rocks, and back up the entire mountain, breathing as if we had just run a marathon with sticks poking into the backs of our legs. When we finally made it back to school, unloaded our prized leña outside the kitchen and collapsed onto the ground, our cook looks at the pile of wood and says something along the lines of, “That’s all you brought? Well maybe it’ll last us 2 days.” What?! That meant after all that work, someone would have to go look again the next day. But I guess we learned to appreciate a little more what it means to live off the land-the work never ends! All in all the month was a success, the people of Ticaco were extremely appreciative of the work we did, and the kids learned a lot about hard work, living in community, and how to value the things they have at home. And I learned a lot too, mostly about my students whom I was able to see in a totally different context than I had known them all year in English class. A lot of my laziest and most difficult students actually turned out to be some of the hardest workers on MdM. There were definitely moments (a lot of them) when they tested my patience and drove me crazy, but I shared a lot of nice moments with them too, singing with them while they played guitar (I taught one of my kids "Ripple" by the Grateful Dead and the song from the movie Once, and I helped some of them compose their own song in English!) answering their questions about my family and life in the US, and listening to them talk about their families and hopes for the future. While it’s one of the harder things we have to do during our JVexperience here, I think Mes de Misión is also one of the most important, and one that we will definitely never forget.
This year Miguel Pro (accompanied by Seamus, Rose, Ashlen, Jessica, Mallory and me) did its MdM in a small town in the mountain region of Tacna called Ticaco. For the entire month we stayed at the school there, sleeping on the floor of empty classrooms with our 28 students, and working during the day. Ticaco is beautiful, surrounded by mountains, rivers, and breathtaking views (definitely a welcome change from the sand dunes of Tacna) but it also sits at approximately 3200m above sea level so that meant doing manual labor at altitude, and huffing and puffing up the side of a mountain everyday (often with firewood on your back) to get back to the school. Being in the mountains in the middle of rainy season also meant pretty regular downpours every afternoon, really cold nights,and the coldest showers I have ever taken in my life. We took to only bathing every 2 or 3 days just because we couldn’t stand it-that water was so cold it made your head hurt!
There are tons of paths that lead from the pueblo down the mountain to all the farms where the people work, and those paths were full of rocks, so our job was to move them out of the way to make the walk a little easier for all the campesinos. It was a little boring and rather tedious work, but not particularly strenuous so we didn’t suffer too much. But probably the most memorable day for me was the day Seamus, Rose, Jess and I took our groups on a hunt to find firewood. The tiny “kitchen” at the school only had a wood-burning stove, so every couple days we had to bring wood back to cook with, and it was incredibly difficult to find. So one day our cook’s son led us to a river at the very bottom of the valley where he said we’d find tons of leña (firewood). It took us well over an hour just to get to the bottom, and the last half hour or so we were wading back and forth across the river, up and over huge rocks,over plants where we couldn’t tell if they were on solid ground or halfway under water to reach this giant tree that would supposedly provide us with days worth of firewood. Well we finally got there, tired, sweating, scraped, and with wet feet, and the boys went to work with the machetes while the rest of us attempted to craft devices to carry the wood out of plastic sacks, pieces of string, and long-sleeved shirts. We loaded up with as much as we could carry and then proceeded back through the river, over the rocks, and back up the entire mountain, breathing as if we had just run a marathon with sticks poking into the backs of our legs. When we finally made it back to school, unloaded our prized leña outside the kitchen and collapsed onto the ground, our cook looks at the pile of wood and says something along the lines of, “That’s all you brought? Well maybe it’ll last us 2 days.” What?! That meant after all that work, someone would have to go look again the next day. But I guess we learned to appreciate a little more what it means to live off the land-the work never ends! All in all the month was a success, the people of Ticaco were extremely appreciative of the work we did, and the kids learned a lot about hard work, living in community, and how to value the things they have at home. And I learned a lot too, mostly about my students whom I was able to see in a totally different context than I had known them all year in English class. A lot of my laziest and most difficult students actually turned out to be some of the hardest workers on MdM. There were definitely moments (a lot of them) when they tested my patience and drove me crazy, but I shared a lot of nice moments with them too, singing with them while they played guitar (I taught one of my kids "Ripple" by the Grateful Dead and the song from the movie Once, and I helped some of them compose their own song in English!) answering their questions about my family and life in the US, and listening to them talk about their families and hopes for the future. While it’s one of the harder things we have to do during our JVexperience here, I think Mes de Misión is also one of the most important, and one that we will definitely never forget.
Below are a few of my favorite pictures from this year's Mes de Misión.
1: All the JVs at 2 of our students' "quinceañero" (15th bday party), in our students' clothes that they made us wear to the party. Who knew we still fit into 15 year olds' jeans!
2: At one of the picturesque lookout spots in Ticaco.
3: The girls on our last day of work on the camino.
4: Sporting our new MdM t-shirts on our last day before coming home.
